I was monitoring this course since a long time and finally it seems it’s gonna happen: Duolingo Russian is finally coming!
98% of the course is ready and Duolingo expects it to be launched on the 10th of September.
While Duolingo it may be a “simple” language course, compared to other solutions around, its wonderful interface has proved to be terrific especially for “exotic” languages. I’ll test it as soon as it comes out!

For a recent project I was looking into Passport Numbers and the, apparently, impossibility to validate them. From there I played with MRTDs or Machine Readable Travel Documents and passports are nowadays one of those, making the customs procedures faster ( unless you land in Miami, then it’s going to be a mess anyway ).

While working on a internet and intranet website with detailed description of cities around the world, I faced difficulties in the encoding and decoding of Unicode data.
SQL Server can store Unicode data with the nvarchar data type, but encoding and decoding a string into real Unicode is a bit less straightforward than it may seem.